Friday, March 23, 2012

Redneck Hot Tub

In January I made a redneck hot tube in the back yard that my girls had a fun time with. It was made out of the wooden frame of an old love seat. I basically tore everything off the love seat except the frame and filled in the empty spaces with 6 X 1/4 wood slats that I had gotten from my father in law when he tore down his garage. Then I put a tarp in the middle and filled it up with water. It was too cold to use the hose to fill the tub up with water and this was a good thing because I then could use the hot water from the house. I also used a fire to heat the water with a couple of large canning pots and I heated rocks that I put in the tub. It was a little stressful keeping the kids away from the tub and fire, while I ran back and forth with buckets of water from the house, but it was worth it in the end.

Here it the picture of the redneck hot tub / hill billy hot tub.

This is me taking a rock heated by the fire to put in the hot tub after I had filled it up with hot water from the house.

And these are pictures of the kids playing in the tub. The water stayed warm for a long time and after a couple of hours they didn't want to come in even though it was cold outside. Last month I filled up the hot tub again but didn't use hot water from the house. I was planning on using more rocks and more heated water by the fire. What I found out was that it would have taken all day to heat the water this way and I wasn't able to get the water hot enough to use. The hardest part of the whole thing is getting the water hot and in the future I would use the heat from the house again or I would have to find larger metal containers to heat the water up with.